Clinical courage: an evolving concept crucial to rural practice

I was introduced to the concept of clinical courage when attending an International Rural Research Symposium last year at Tromso University in Norway. Dr Lucie Walters, of Flinders University in Australia, ran an enthralling workshop about some work that she and her team are doing to quantify and understand what we mean and can learn from clinical courage, particularly in the context of professional isolation and delivery of rural health services.

It’s a concept that seems to resonate easily with rural health practitioners, particularly rural GPs. Despite this, there is relatively little that I have found to expand on the concept. Two very helpful resources are a “President’s Message. Clinical Courage” by Dr John Wooton (found in Can J Rural Med 2011; 16(2)) and two comments from Peter Dunlop and Keith MacLellan in the followup issue (found in Can J Rural Med 2011; 16(3)). The latter comment introduces another concept of ‘learned helplessness’, and I suspect that this will be of increasing importance as debate evolves regarding the fragmentation of undergraduate curriculums and the need to consider generalist undifferentiated training versus teaching in more specialist settings.

So, I was delighted to be asked to participate in an interview run by two of the Flinders University students Ella and Laura who are assisting with the project, whilst here in Cairns at the WONCA World Rural Health Conference. They interviewed me, and they kindly agreed to me interviewing them!

You can hear about their experiences of medical teaching so far, and also more about the concept of clinical courage in the audio clip below: